Raul Castro Delivers Moncada Anniversary Address

PA2707012494 Havana Cubavision Television in Spanish 2316
GMT 26 Jul 94
PA2707012494
Havana Cubavision Television
Spanish
BFN
[Speech by First Vice President Raul Castro marking the 41st
anniversary of the Moncada assault at the Pioneers Palace on the
Isle of Youth -- live]

[Text] Dear Fidel; beloved comrade Army General (No Muyien
Giap); illustrious representative of the brotherly people of
Vietnam [applause; crowd chants: "Cuba, Vietnam -- united they
will win."]; dear friend (Jose Antonio Barroso), mayor of the
city of Puerto Real, passionate ambassador of the solidarity of
the Spanish people with our fatherland [applause]; distinguished
guests; fellow countrymen:

Many memories come to mind: the days prior to the assault on
the Moncada Barracks; the trip to Santiago; the hours of uneven
combat; the bitter days of Boniato Prison; the parody of the
trial; the moment at which, looking out from the small window of
the airplane carrying the convicted ones, we discovered we would
not be imprisoned at the fortress of La Cabana as the tribunal
had decided but, rather, at the prison on the Isle of Pines,
cynically called Modelo Prison.

We were too young at that time, and we were able to carrying
out, with Fidel's leadership and organization, those events that
resumed armed, revolutionary action. We fulfilled our duty
during the year of the centennial of the apostle, who was
banished to this island when he was even younger than us due to
his love for the independence of our fatherland.

Antonio Maceo was also younger when he waged his first
combat
and earned his rank of sergeant due to his bravery. Julio
Antonio Mella was murdered in Mexico at the age of 26. Cuban
youths have always been at the frontline of patriotic struggles.

The rebel army was a troop of chiefs, officers, and young
combatants. Young men have generously offered their precious
lives in Angola, Ethiopia, and in various countries of the world
for the internationalist ideal of fighting together with
brotherly peoples and against oppression. At this time, as we
dedicate this 26 July to today's young generation and as we
selected this Isle of Youth as the site for this central event,
we are expressing our absolute trust in the millions of young
men and women who are waging, together with their elders, the
most difficult battle the Cuban nation has ever confronted.

The efforts of our youth are outstandingly present at every
battlefront. They are in the FAR [Revolutionary Armed Forces]
military units, mounting guard for the fatherland. They are
guarding our country's borders at the cays and along solitary
areas of the coasts, watching over internal order and the
security of the state. We find the young combatants of the
Interior Ministry everywhere, in the Youth Labor Army, deployed
in the mountains and plains, in coffee, sugarcane, citrus
fruits, and tobacco plantations as well as at various crop
farms. The young workers constitute a high percentage of our
working class and are the majority among the university
professionals and midlevel technicians. They are outstanding
due to their number and their contributions at scientific
research centers. Naturally, hundreds of thousands are studying
at midlevel schools and at schools of higher learning. In
culture and sports, the expertise of our young artists and the
courage and training of our athletes transcend our national
borders.

We can be proud of our young people: wholesome, jovial,
cooperative, studious, hardworking, and free of drug-addiction,
gangsterism, and other vices that morally cripple growing
numbers of young sectors in both rich and Third World countries.
This does not mean 100 percent of our young people exhibit
socially correct behavior. There are misguided young people in
Cuba. These sorry elements do not embody our young people.
They do represent, however, a social factor which we must not
underestimate and with which we must work hard and patiently to
reeducate them.

Our Union of Young Communists [UJC] is a prestigious
organization that is full of creative ideas and has a great
ability to marshal and mobilize students and young people. It
does not disregard work with the children, through the
Organization of Pioneers.

In schools, the Federation of Intermediate Level Students
and
the Federation of University Students are legitimate emulators
of Cuban students' tradition of struggle. Tens of thousands of
these students form part of the student brigades of workers
during this warm summer, and they spend part of their vacation
doing hard, agricultural work. Those who were young during the
days of the Moncada Barracks, Granma, and Sierra Maestra, those
who were young yesterday, and those who are young now have the
common patrimony of the edifice which we all have built.

We are identified by common patriotic and revolutionary
values that permit a natural, generational flux.

The big tasks assigned to the young people, since the days
of
the literacy campaign down to the internationalist missions,
have served to engage the dreams of heroic deeds that are
characteristic of the young.

The doors of education the revolution has opened wide for
everybody have enabled the young to go as far and as high in
their pursuit for knowledge as their talent and will allow them.

This island is evidence of what young people can do. They
have transformed this island.

Young people from all corners of the country have colonized
and garnished this place, which for a century was synonymous
with prison and exile, horror, torture, and death.

When Jose Marti and Pablo de la Torriente Brau were young,
they wrote volumes denouncing this terrible situation. Today,
they would write beautiful pages describing today's situation,
as thousands of young people from approximately 50 Third World
countries receive solidarity, love, and education here.

The Isle of Youth is not just a grand, international school;
it is also a producer of citrus, lobsters, and marble, to
mention only its exportable products. Great investments have
been made on the island during the 35 years of revolution, in
both structural works and social and economic works.

The people from the Isle of Youth are aware that only
constant work and the efficient exploitation of installed,
productive capability will allow them to be self-sustaining in
food production and other consumer articles as well as afford
them the possibility of returning to the national economy the
resources invested in the island's development.

By deciding the Isle of Youth would be the venue for this
event, the Politburo was demonstrating its recognition of the
effort made in this municipality for more than three decades,
the determination with which it is facing the difficulties of
the special period and the particular attention it is giving to
defense tasks with the objective of being declared ready for
defense during the second phase.

We congratulate the people from the Isle of Youth for the
advances and for the will of the party directorate and the
government of not allowing itself to be conquered by the
it-cannot-be-done attitude. We especially congratulate the
youthful first secretary of the party's municipal committee,
citizen (Emilio Gonzalez Farad) [applause], who was born and
raised on this island. He has been a witness to as well as a
participant in the transformation of the land of his birth, of
this piece of Cuba.

Citizens, the will to withstand the rigors of the special
period and to overcome the difficulties and come out ahead, the
character of the people of the Isle of Youth, is what is
predominant from one extreme to the other of the largest island
in the Antilles. Our people are rising to the occasion in the
face of the dangers of all types that are brewing around the
fatherland. They are reviewing and strengthening their militant
lives and resolutely devoting themselves to creative work, a
process which is the only way to overcome the special period.

We are constantly touring the country not only to review the
engineering works for defense, the maintenance and preservation
of weapons and combat techniques, and the state of preparedness
of the millions of men and women who would victoriously wage the
war of all the people in the event of an imperialist aggression.
More than just visiting the batteries where the cannons are
kept, we are touring the plantations where beans are being grown.

The country's main political and economic task today is the
production of foodstuffs, including sugar. There where this
objective is being pursued with determination and initiative,
there where the cadres know how to instill in all the people the
conviction this can be done, we are advancing in the improvement
of the food situation, step by step, firmly consolidating what
has been achieved and maintaining our course forward, an example
of which is seen in the small municipality of Caybarien.

Guantanamo, the most easterly and impoverished province,
is also an eloquent example of successful struggle against
adversities. Three floods in only three months there have left
property damage amounting to millions and swept away banana
farms and other plantations time and time again. The people of
Guantanamo repeatedly rose together, however, to recover the
losses and do much more.

The people of Guantanamo did not cry and lament over flooded
rivers; instead, they controlled the flooded waters with the
heroism they learned from their Mambi grandparents and their
rebel parents.

We held territorial party meetings during these days in
July,
one in the six eastern provinces, another in the five central
provinces. We will hold another meeting very soon for the three
western provinces, including the special municipality of the
Isle of Youth. These meetings will have a specific objective:
to analyze how to face with greater efficiency and unity the
challenges of the special period, the intensified imperialist
blockade, and the unbridled campaign launched by
counterrevolutionary radio stations from the United States on 17
frequencies with 1,148 hours weekly of distorted news reports
and coarse slander against Cuba.

These meetings characteristically analyze a broad agenda,
but
in a peculiar manner. We do not make the usual recount of what
has been accomplished; instead, we analyze what the difficulties
and deficiencies are in each place. Within a fully democratic
atmosphere, with realism, aggressiveness, and optimism, we
subjectively identify those deficiencies that need to be
promptly remedied and those deficiencies we objectively define
as needing creative, alternative solutions.

Just as we have done at those meeting, we are taking
advantage of this podium to summon all revolutionaries and
patriots to close ranks and fight together under the direction
of the party in each province, municipality, council, community,
work or study center, convinced that the intelligence and force
of the questioned masses can accomplish everything and that the
special period will be a new victorious battle in our
fatherland's heroic history, under Fidel's supreme direction.

Citizens, without even brushing off the dust from his
trip, after rendering a most fervent homage to the liberator,
Simon Bolivar, and after signing on behalf of Cuba the agreement
establishing the Association of Caribbean States, the most
outstanding son of Cuba in this century is here presiding over
this event, as is his custom. [applause; crowd shouts: "Raul, we
can do it here! Long live Fidel, and viva the revolution!
Viva!"]

He is the one who showed us we could assault Moncada
Barracks; that we could change that setback into a victory; that
we could reach Cuban coasts on board the Granma yacht; that we
could resist the enemy, hunger, rain, and cold; and that we
could organize a revolutionary army at the Sierra Maestra
following the disaster in Alegria del Pio [applause]. He showed
us we could set new guerrilla fronts in Oriente Province with
our columns and Almeida's. He showed us we could defeat the
offensive of more than 10,000 soldiers with only 300 rifles;
that we could emulate the Maceo and Gomez epic fight by
reinforcing the battle from one coast to the other with the
columns headed by Che and Camilo; and that we could oust the
Batista regime supported by the imperialistic United States with
the people's support.

He taught us we could defeat the mercenary invasion of Playa
Giron in 72 hours while campaigning to eradicate illiteracy;
that we could proclaim the socialist character of our revolution
at some 90 miles from the empire, as its warships were on their
way to Cuba to aid the mercenary brigade; that we could firmly
hold onto the irrevocable principles of our sovereignty without
surrendering to the U.S. nuclear blackmail during the October
1962 crisis; that we could send solidary aid to other brotherly
peoples to fight colonial oppression, foreign aggression, and
racism; that we could defeat South African racists by
safeguarding the territorial integrity of Angola, by forcing the
independence of Namibia, and by landing a heavy blow on the
Apartheid regime.

He also taught us what could make Cuba a medical power by
reducing infant mortality to the lowest rate in the Third World
while considerably raising our population's life expectancy;
that we could make Cuba a great scientific country by making
progress in the modern and decisive fields of genetic
engineering and biotechnology and by entering the closed sphere
of international pharmaceutical trade; that we could develop
tourism despite the U.S. blockade against us; that we could
build land causeways to make Cuba a growing and more attractive
archipelago by tapping our natural beauties to attain a growing
source of foreign exchange; that we could resist, survive, and
develop ourselves, without renouncing the principles and
achievements of Socialism, in the unipolar world despite the
omnipotence of the multinational companies that emerged
following the fall of the European Socialist Bloc and the
disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Fidel's ongoing teaching is: It can be done. Man can
overcome the most difficult situation if he does not abandon his
will to win, if he correctly evaluates every single situation
and does not renounce fair and noble principles.

As you all know, our commander in chief has just returned
from Cartagena de Indias, from the summit meeting of chiefs of
state and government who constitute the Association of Caribbean
States. This association is composed of 25 independent states,
Cuba and other islands of the Greater Antilles, the Lesser
Antilles, Central America, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela, and
11 associate members that are dependent territories. All these
countries have a population of approximately 200 million and a
territory of 4.5 million square kilometers.

Despite U.S. opposition, the Caribbean brothers said no to
Yankee pressure. They bravely said that one cannot conceive of
the Caribbean without Cuba. This is an important step toward
Latin American integration, which was the ideal of Bolivar and
Marti and today is a cause for which our people are ardently
struggling.

This small country, under a blockade and harassment from the
empire, has been chosen as a founding and full member of an
association of countries in its geographic area. This is a
diplomatic and political victory for Cuba and a bitter pill for
anti-Cuban circles, which predominate in the U.S. Administration
and legislature nowadays.

In the face of each victory our country achieves in the
international arena, U.S. experts in anti-Cuban campaigns launch
a campaign to becloud it. To cite just one example, remember
how in 1979, when Cuba assumed the Nonaligned Movement
presidency, the U.S. Senate found, between quotation marks,
there was a Soviet Brigade in Cuba. The Senate found this out
after that brigade had been in the country for 17 years. Now
they are unscrupulously taking advantage of the accident
involving an ancient tugboat that was commandeered under the
direction of two irresponsible individuals, an accident in which
more than 30 people died, including women and children who had
been involved in the attempt to leave the country illegally.

For these lives lost on the bottom of the ocean, one has to
place on trial primarily the U.S. Administration and its
permanent attitude of aggression toward our country, which
includes the immigration policy for Cuban citizens, to whom it
denies visas to travel legally to the United States but welcomes
them as heroes when they arrive on the Florida coasts in rafts
and fragile vessels or in hijacked airplanes and helicopters,
without the slightest concern for the risk being run by those
who use these methods.

In this case, the organizers of the boat seizure, by having
placed more than 60 people in a 115-year-old wooden tugboat fit
to carry a crew of only four and sailing in port waters,
traveled toward an inevitable wreck in the strait.

Cuban authorities have thoroughly investigated the event
and exhaustively informed its public of how the tragic events
occurred. Half the people in the tugboat were saved from
perishing thanks to the timely and courageous action of the
border guards, who rescued 31 people from their deaths, and to
the attitude of the workers, the crew members of the other three
tugboats who tried to foil the theft and stop the death trip of
the 63 people who were on board a large coffin that apparently
floated but was unavoidably destined to sink long before it got
to any port. Those workers generously gave their own life
preservers to the shipwrecked. This is how comprehensively we
investigated the shipwreck. The survivors themselves have
helped clarify the events.

We strongly reject the orchestrated, hypocritical, and
deceitful anti-Cuban campaign regarding this event and the
coarse intervention in the internal affairs of our sovereign
country by the United States or any other country. Neither the
State Department, the U.S. Senate, nor President Clinton has any
right to intervene in an event that is the exclusive
jurisdiction of the sovereign government of the Republic of
Cuba. The United States lacks not only a legal basis to
legislate on an event that took place in our territorial waters
but also the moral authority.

Confronted with so much hypocrisy and opportunism, we are
obligated to recall the tragic events in Waco, Texas, last year.
World public opinion followed with anguish for 51 days the
actions of the federal officers close to the installations of
the Branch Davidian sect. Millions of people around the world
prayed to their god that the police siege would not end in a
horrible, human tragedy. The end took place before the
terrified eyes of television viewers in all the corners of the
world: the initiation of police attacks against the wooden
structures of the religious institution; the advance of the
armored vehicles; the throwing of tear gas; the shooting of
lethal weapons; and the deadly explosion in the church in which
more than 80 human beings were burned to death, including many
women and children. No one can claim accidental causes in this
appalling incident, because the action had been cold-bloodily
planned for several days, perhaps weeks, by the FBI, that is,
the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Texas police.
It was approved by the U.S. attorney general, who obtained
President Clinton's authorization to act.

Everything I have said is confirmed by the textual and
public
statements of both authorities. Attorney General Reno had
admitted she had made a number of errors in assessment and
judgment. Under the overwhelming weight of her responsibility
in such tragic results, which, of course, she did not expect,
she presented her resignation, but the president did not accept
it. Nevertheless, such a serious event has not been
convincingly clarified, and we do not know whether any security
officer or government employee has been to jail or brought to
trial because of it.

The invisible strings in the United States used to gag the
press for reasons of the state functioned once again in the Waco
case. One year prior to that, there had been an explosion of
violence in Los Angeles, California, and in other states when
four white policemen were acquitted after savagely beating
Rodney King, a black driver. As a result of the repression by
the authorities, 44 people were killed, 2,000 were injured, and
an undetermined number were imprisoned. We yield our assessment
of these events to what a U.S. newspaper, THE NEW YORK TIMES,
stated: This is what we have in this country: Fear against
fear, hatred against hatred, revenge against revenge, end of
quote.

While this is the brutality and violence that prevails in
the
United States, on the contrary, something such as this has never
happened in our country. There are no missing or tortured
individuals here, and we do not have here the classic death
squads that abound in Latin America without the State Department
really worrying about that. Those in Cuba who join that cynical
campaign against our country are showing their true faces as
traitors and accomplices of the enemies of the fatherland.

Fidel has said many times: This society is made up of
volunteers. The country's doors are open for those who want to
leave legally. There have always been people for whom the
concepts of fatherland and independence mean nothing. There
always were, are, and will be deaf people who refuse to listen
to the bells of Majagua. The vast majority of our people deeply
love their fatherland, however, and the glorious history of its
existence as an independent nation, thanks to the sacrifice of
its best children for more than 125 years of struggle for
freedom. That struggle for freedom began last century,
continues during this century, and will continue just as strong
during the 21st century, during the next millennium of our era.

In the face of the empire, which seeks to make us yield and
impose its will on us, and the traitors who in our own backyard
have always agreed with the enemies of the fatherland, we will
fulfill the Marti rule of never allowing the sword of freedom to
fall. We must raise that sword higher than ever before, because
that incensed campaign over the sorrowful event of the tugboat,
at a time when the United States is intervening in any point of
the world with similar pretexts, entails a serious threat to
Cuba.

The U.S. Senate has gone so far in its anti-Cuban hysteria
that it has decided to suggest to the president that he accuse
Cuba at the United Nations and propose a Security Council
resolution condemning it. We cannot underestimate this Yankee
escalation against our country that is taking place in the
unipolar world in which we live and at a time when our
fatherland is facing its most difficult times.

Hence, as in the dangerous days of the October crisis 32
years ago, together with millions of Cubans, let us repeat
today: For whatever, however, and wherever, commander in chief.
[crowd answers: "Give the order."] [applause]
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